Why more technical writers don’t use these techniques is a mystery to me. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that academic professional still look upon anything this readable and non-esoteric as necessarily frivolous.

They might acknowledge that others could be “fooled,” but they don’t think they were. That is what gives mindless eating so much power over us—we’re not aware it’s happening.

People don’t eat calories, they eat volume. There’s a saying in the food industry that the two cheapest ingredients you can add to food are water and air.

a menu in a French-style restaurant in the Hanover, New Hampshire, area described one dish as being “graced with spring-fresh medallions of well-mannered beef.” Well-mannered beef? Are there cows out there who say, “I realize I’m six hours away from becoming an entrée, but I’m okay with that. Enough about me. How are you doing?” Doubtful. Yet if these menu names and descriptions seem so ridiculous out of context, why are they so common? They are common because they work.

But when I was growing up, every time John Lennon’s “Imagine” was broadcast over the car radio, my dad would smack his forehead and command me to turn it off. “Now there’s a hero for you, Frankie,” he’d say. “I’m in Vietnam getting shot at while a millionaire rock star prances around a hotel room naked telling the world getting laid is better than going to war. And for that bit of wisdom everybody makes him out to be the messiah.”

She struck me as the kind of person who, upon loading new Windows software on her laptop, scrupulously read every word of Microsoft’s licensing agreement before clicking the “I ACCEPT THE AGREEMENT” button — just to verify Microsoft didn’t try to get cute between the incumbent version and the new one.

I spun myself off the stool and headed for the men’s room, where Ron Buernekehl, one palm pressed against the cement wall to steady him, a can of beer cradled in the other, splashed urine into the tin trough. After a protracted sigh, he said, “At my age, Francis, you don’t buy beer any more, you just rent it.”

You must always think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.

The words themselves, Don says, have their own independent status. The creator of the words does not matter.
“You’re right,” Roger says. “Who knows why people in history did good things? For all we know, Jesus was trying to get the loaves and fishes account.”